Wade Mainer (b. 1907) is believed to be the longest-lived country entertainer ever. His banjo lessons began in childhood and he played informally into his adult years, when he joined his brother, fiddler J. E. Mainer (1898-1971), in Mainer's Mountaineers. Music became their ticket out of the cotton mills in 1934. At the time, country styles were swiftly evolving from community-based performance into mass-market broadcast via radio, records, and the silver screen. Mainer's Mountaineers attracted radio sponsors and touring opportunities, allowing the brothers to become full-time musicians.

The core of this style is in the right hand, and Bob demonstrates, in detail, how to get the real old-time clawhammer sound. He shows you easy renditions of four traditional banjo pieces, then adds hammer-ons, pull-offs, and other embellishments that create style and complexity. Within minutes, you'll be playing Shortenin' Bread and Cripple Creek in G tuning. Bob introduces Liberty in double-C tuning, which features double thumbing the fifth string, a slightly more advanced right-hand approach. The well-known fiddle tune Soldier's Joy rounds out the lesson, with Bob adding a variety of slides to the other skills you've learned.

If you've never played banjo before, this is the place to start! We teach you all the basics of three-finger bluegrass banjo picking. Each tune is explained slowly and clearly, note-by-note. We leave nothing to chance! Build a strong foundation and develop your ear as you learn to play.

Clawhammer Style Banjo - A Complete Guide For Beginning And Advanced Banjo Players| From Ken Perlman, here is a brilliant teaching guide that is destined to become the handbook on how to play the banjo. The style is easy to learn, and covers the instruction itself, basic right and left-hand positions, simple chords, and fundamental clawhammer techniques; the brush, the Õbumm-tittyÕ strum, pull-offs, and slides. For the advanced player, there is instruction on more complicated picking, double thumbing, quick slides, fretted pull-offs, harmonics, improvisation, and more. The book includes more than 40 fun-to-play banjo tunes.